“we cannot formulate an adequate development policy for a majority of the world’s population without knowing how their past economic and social history influenced their current underdevelopment” (Ibid.). Galeano was heavily influenced by dependency theory which argued that ‘as a result of the unequal distribution of power and resources, some countries have developed at a faster pace than others’ (Rose, 2016).

This article reflects on Galeano’s text as it reaches its fiftieth anniversary and considers what it tells us about the importance of history to the contemporary discourse on development. The five hundred years of ‘pillage’ that followed Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492 included indentured slavery, extractivism, colonialism, indigenous genocide and, in the second half of the 20 th century, an economic re-colonisation through debt, neoliberalism, rigged trade rules, corporate impunity and tied aid. “A continent blessed with bountiful natural resources has been systematically stripped of its gold, silver, tin, copper, oil, nitrates, manganese and rubber, while its people remain among the poorest on earth, with high levels of infant mortality, illiteracy and child prostitution” (2009). In a review of the book, Mongredien suggests that it offers an ‘impassioned and lucid’ account of how: Galeano gives an unsparing account of ‘how the Spaniards and Portuguese in America combined propagation of the Christian faith with usurpation and plunder of native wealth’ (1997: 14). The book has always retained its reputation for meticulous research and a luminous writing style which the novelist Isabel Allende suggests is ‘poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival’ (Allende, 1997: xii). When it was first published in 1971, Open Veins was banned by military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, and Galeano was imprisoned and forced into exile. Fifty years ago, the Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano published his classic study of the European – and later United States’ (US) - colonisation and rapacious plunder of Latin America titled Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1997).

Open veins of latin america book review